


A Precedent

by disenchanted



Series: This happy breed of men [1]
Category: Henry IV Part 1 - Shakespeare
Genre: (of a sort), Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Drugs, Emotional Manipulation, Friends With Benefits, M/M, Non-Consensual Voyeurism, Power Imbalance, and then Hotspur just chundered everywhere, troublesome teenage siblings, vague parent/child incest undertones
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-08
Updated: 2016-01-08
Packaged: 2018-05-12 14:48:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5669833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/pseuds/disenchanted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ed and Hal defile Nell Poins' bed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Precedent

**Author's Note:**

> This was written as an unauthorized prequel to [Lilliburlero](http://archiveofourown.org/user/Lilliburlero)'s Hal/Francis fic, [The base-string of humility](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5654728); I've done very little in the way of AU-verse continuity, but I've stolen a lot in the way of characterization and detail. Sorry, Lilliburlero, I set off in the direction of Alan Hollinghurst and somehow tripped and fell into Edward St Aubyn...

**John (14:27)**  Dad phoned me to tell you remember dinner tonite with his friends. Will you tell him you know so he'll leave me alone ??? 

**John (14:34)** Are you at home? Is there food

**John (14:46)** My train is almost at the station 

**John (14:50)** Is there food at home? 

**John (15:02)** Text me back you effing knob

**John (15:03)** I know you're reading these

**John (15:11)** If I get a curry delivered to the house can you pay for it and I'll pay you back before dinner

**John (15:17)** Curry will be there in 20 min thanks

**John (15:46)** You absolute fucking cunt

**John (16:01)** Well now dad knows you got throat chlamydia from Harry Greene during freshers week so well done Hal

**John (16:03)** He's having a panic attack cos he thinks you're going to die of AIDS 

 

'Who's texting you?' asked Ed vaguely. He flicked his bloodshot eyes towards the rearview mirror, then merged into the lane that would take them to the Edgware tube station, where Nell and her two ponytailed, _Tatler_ -reading schoolfriends would be summarily, and thankfully, ushered out of the backseat.

Hal's presence had mortified the two schoolfriends into producing a continuous stream of squeaks which Hal could only guess were meant to approximate the conversation of grown-ups: they ventured references to unspeakable ex-boyfriends, then glanced towards him and Ed in hope and in fear of perceiving a response. He wondered whether sixteen-year-old girls of moderate intelligence (they were being trained, like Ed had been, for Oxbridge) but little practical experience knew enough to tell that he and Ed were fucking. It had been a few years since Ed had made his obligatory coming-out speech to his parents and received their obligatory but distant and slightly terrified acceptance. Beyond an ill-fated _thing_ with the head of his college's LGBT Student Union representative, however, Ed had never actually had a boyfriend to bring home. His mum and dad were canny enough to recognise his and Hal's relationship for what it was, which meant they had no hope whatsoever that Hal would make a decent, monogamous, smartly-dressed gay out of him; Hal had no idea whether Nell had caught on to the reason why he and Ed spent so much time in Ed's bedroom, with the door locked, playing jangly indie music at full volume.

'Huh?' said Hal, though he had heard Ed well enough the first time.

'I said who keeps texting you,' said Ed.

'Oh, just John. He's down from school for the weekend and he's going absolutely mad because I didn't run to him the minute he came home.' 

'He adores you,' said Ed, pulling into the little roundabout in front of the station. 'It's almost sweet. It'd be sweeter if he would shave that vile fucking hair on his upper lip, and learn to take a shower more than once a week. Did we smell that awful when we were fifteen? —Right, Nell, Lauren, um, other one, Mum says back by ten.' 

'Chloe,' the other one supplied.

Just as Nell put her hand on the door-handle, she turned back, her charm bracelets jingling, and said, 'Will you ring Mum at ten and say there are tube delays and we won't be back till eleven?'

'Ring her yourself,' said Ed. 'And don't take drugs; and use a condom or a dental dam. Cheers.'

'Fuck _off_ , Ed. Also, will you go into my room and get the parcel that's in there and post it before five today? I'm returning a dress I bought online and the shop won't refund me unless they get it by the sixteenth and if I don't get a refund Mum will yell at me for wasting money and then she'll yell at you too. Thanks. Bye-ee!'

 

* * *

 

Ten minutes later Ed and Hal were in a Sainsbury's car park, hotboxing the Poinses' 1999 Ford Fiesta. It was Hal's weed, so he was due first toke, but where Ed sucked down half the joint in one breath and held the smoke in the back of his throat till he was half-unconscious, Hal took an absentminded puff, as if it were a cigarette. He hated weed—it made him nervous and stupid—but he smoked with Ed and Jack all the time anyway; he didn't know why. Maybe because as long as he wouldn't be able to pass a drug test he wouldn't be able to work. Never mind that his father would probably be able to wangle him a job he could do stoned out of his skull on sixty different substances: it was the principle of the thing.

'You know,' said Hal, passing the joint, 'I'm supposed to be going home for dinner with my dad and John and some of dad's old, boring friends tonight.'

Ed responded only after he had let loose a plume of bluish smoke, which floated up to the carpeted ceiling of the car and began to dissipate. He said, 'Well, are you going?'

'I don't know. Harry Percy's father is going to be there. Dad's going to spend the whole time getting him to talk about what his son's doing, building schoolhouses out of ants in Costa Rica or quaffing Ebola fluids or whatever. _Hotspur_. Ugh.' Putting on a voice that was really little more than his own a couple of octaves lower, Hal half-lowered his eyelids, let his jaw hang slightly, and said, 'Wow, that's _so interesting_ … yah … it really reminds me of this time I spent a month in this village in the Amazon? Yah, totally fascinating, they're such a _dignified_ people, you know … but like, one day I was chewing corn with the village orphans, it's this thing they do, sort of an acquired taste, yah, and these chaps drive up in Jeeps, and they've all got assault rifles? I was like, "Wow, what's all this about?" So it turns out they were a drug cartel, and all their Jeeps were full of cocaine? … No, it was definitely cocaine. No, it wasn't heroin, they haven't got heroin in the Amazon. … Yah, I was like, certain I was going to die… Like, where's a priest when you need one, right? But then I made this sort of spear with a stick and a wooden spoon…'

The monologue was enough to distract Ed from what he had meant to say, which Hal suspected was something along the lines of 'What's stopping you from doing what Harry Percy's doing, and shutting your dad up?' But it was gone now, dissolved into Ed's whinnying, intoxicated laughter. In his pocket, Hal's mobile buzzed again, just once; he stuffed it into the console box, along with the old receipts and half-melted Mars bars and lost earrings, and took the last pathetic stub of the joint from Ed.

 

* * *

 

Upon entering it, Hal realised he had never actually been in Nell Poins' bedroom before. He had sometimes glimpsed it on the way down the corridor to Ed's room, getting a blurry impression of fairy lights strung up above the bed and several mega-sized posters of some beady-eyed movie star in a truly regrettable black wig. Now he was standing in his socks on the fluffy blue rug in the middle of the room, watching Ed rifle through Nell's old school notebooks and discarded outfits in search of her parcel.

Like the bedrooms of Hal's younger brothers, the room constituted a peculiar collage of the child and the incipient adult: there were stuffed animals lined up on the dresser and empty cans of Smirnoff vodka and cola in the little bin beneath the desk, camouflaged with a scattering of unused tissues. Pages torn out of a fashion magazine adorned the mirror over the vanity, which held a staggering array of Boots lipgloss. Hal felt a strange, affectless fondness for Nell; he was sorry she had Ed for a brother, but not sorry enough to reform him. He hoped she would grow up to do something that would put her far away from the dumpy North London semi she had had the misfortune to be born into.

'It's not fucking here,' Ed groaned, kicking an empty shopping bag for effect. 'I don't even think there _is_ a parcel, I think she's just having a laugh.'

'She wouldn't have asked you to go into her room unless she needed it,' said Hal. 'You could always ring her up and ask where she put it.'

Ed, demonstrating his terrific suggestibility, put his mobile to his ear and sat on the edge of her bed, making a depression in the puffy floral-print duvet. Hal waited till Ed greeted his sister, then sat next to him and leant in to kiss his neck, scraping his teeth over the line of muscle that swept inwards from the jaw to the collarbone. 

'Yeah, hi, I can't find your parcel,' said Ed, swatting ineffectually at Hal. He would have done better, thought Hal, if he hadn't leant back to expose the full length of his neck. With a twinge of disgust Hal noticed a scattering of spots shining out from the five o'clock shadow on the underside of Ed's chin, and tried to aim his kisses to avoid them. 'Yeah, I looked in the closet. And on the desk. … Well, do you think I would know where it is? —Hal, fucking stop it. … No, I was talking to Hal. Yeah, he's helping me look. No, he's not doing anything weird to your room. … I've got no idea, Nell, it's not my bloody bedroom. … Fine. Yeah, whatever. Fine!' 

Presently Ed's mobile was buried in a pile of clothes at the other end of the room, and Ed was on top of Hal, pressing him bodily into the duvet. The door was open, but no one was at home; anyway it wouldn't be Hal in trouble if they were found out. Despite his increasingly importunate irritation with Ed as a person, Hal was aroused by the fact that Ed was aroused, here, now, because he had been given a couple of sorry kisses on the neck, and to the degree that he didn't have the wherewithal to suggest they move to his own bed. No matter how often they did this, no matter how often Hal kissed him with tongue or groped his arse through his jeans, Ed always seemed like he couldn't quite believe his luck. Hal doubted whether Ed would get used to it sooner than he, Hal, got bored. 

Hal was sprawled diagonally across the bed, and Ed was curled up uncomfortably between his spread legs, sucking him off, when the muffled sound of Ed's ringtone asserted itself over the noise of the bed creaking and Hal's rote sex-patter: 'Yeah, fuck yeah, ugh, just like that, just like that, fuck, Ed…' Immediately upon hearing the ringtone Ed's head popped up, though his sweaty hand was curled still around Hal's prick.

'Leave it,' said Hal. 'I've been ignoring mine all day.'

'Yeah, I know you have, I've been with you all day. Hang on, it could be important. Maybe Mum's dead or something.' Naked from the waist down, with his surprisingly decent prick bobbing in the air, Ed went to retrieve his mobile; after he answered it he padded back across the room, blanching and mute, to hand it over to Hal. 

'Dad?' said Hal, propping his head up with his arm and nodding towards his unattended erection. Ed wavered; Hal made a face that he hoped conveyed his shattering annoyance. 'Why are you ringing me on Ed's mobile?'

Henry said, 'You're with him, aren't you?'

'Well, yeah, but that doesn't mean you can ring his mobile and expect me to talk to you. I was ignoring mine for a reason.'

'I don't find this amusing, Henry, and only God knows how I managed to raise a son who _does_. I've been lenient these last few years; I don't ask anything of you—except that you be available to me when I have need of you, which is the very—the very—the absolute least you could possibly do.'

'That's asking quite a lot of me, actually,' said Hal. Ed had assumed the proper position; Hal stroked his hair reassuringly and guided his head lower. 'If I came to every dinner you asked me to, you would start asking me to lunches. Then you would start ringing me in the middle of the night asking me to come home because you haven't been taking your benzos and you think your friends are plotting to kill you, and you would say just the same thing you are now: "This is the least you can do for me, Harry… Oh, Harry, you give me stomach cramp, why can't you do this one thing for me?"'

Ed was in good form today, thought Hal detachedly. He had got over his initial inhibition and was sucking rather determinedly at Hal's prick; he used his hand to pull at the base of it in time with the backwards-forwards motion of his head, every once in a while reaching down to cup Hal's balls. Hal heard the muzzy back-of-the-throat noises Ed let loose only when he was certain they weren't overheard.

'I've spent more time today than I care to have done,' said Henry, 'just in getting you to _speak_ to me directly. If I have to beg you to attend a dinner that's being held for _your_ benefit, and _your_ benefit alone, I'm sure I don't know how much more lenience I can offer you. Do you know Harry—I mean Lord Northumberland—came down from Scotland today for the sole purpose of seeing you? He didn't come to see _me_.'

'Sorry your friends don't like you,' said Hal. 'Look, I'm busy tonight, so— You'll have to get off watching Harry Percy's dad humiliate me some other time. You _really_ aren't fooling me if you think I don't know why you pleaded for him to' —here he imitated his father's voice— ' _come down from Scotland_. But, ah— But tell me something, Dad, why don't you just ask Harry Percy himself to dinner, get us side-by-side? Have you ever—ugh, God—ever thought about doing a DNA test on us—see whether he isn't the product of that one shag you had with Lady Northumberland back in 1991?' 

'Busy with _what_ ,' said Henry, 'having a pint in Eastcheap with that fat old queen and that little Jewish boy?'

Hal was staggeringly, humiliatingly, inconceivably aroused. He was dripping sweat, his throat was closing, he felt he was running a fever so hot that in ten minutes he would be brain-dead. As with most strong feelings he had, he was disinclined to investigate the precise nature of the arousal; it was enough for him to clutch the side of Ed's head and give himself over to the wet pull of Ed's lips and tongue, the odd little slurping sounds that in most other circumstances made Hal's gorge rise. His head swam; the faces in Nell's posters blurred.

'Yes,' said Hal, 'that's exactly what I'm doing, thanks, I'm glad you've been paying attention. But don't worry about me, don't worry about my—my honour, my virginity, my heterosexuality, whatever: nothing Jack or Ed could do to me would— _degrade_ me more than—the fact— Of being _your son_ —' 

Somewhere in the dimmest recesses of his mind Hal reflected that he hadn't actually believed anyone could have an orgasm so massive their eyes literally rolled into the back of their head. As far as that went it was a bit painful—the extraocular muscles could take only so much strain—but all the same it was possibly the only moment of pure, total, ego-obliterating ecstasy he had experienced and was likely ever to experience, unless he died in a state of grace. He was silent; he clutched Ed's hair, flung his head back against Nell's polka-dotted pillow, and opened his mouth in a shriek that was never quite vocalised. 

When he had finished, Hal glanced down to see Ed, Hal's prick still in hand, staring up at him in what seemed almost like terror. There was come on his cheek and the tip of his nose. Hal was glad Ed at least didn't feel flattered.

'—Harry,' his father was saying, 'Harry, listen to … I'm not … but I—'

'Right, okay. You've convinced me, I'll come to dinner and talk to Lord Northumberland about the weather in Edinburgh and his son's weight-lifting regimen; just promise you won't drive off somewhere to have a breakdown again, it was embarrassing enough the first three times. See you around nine, yeah?'

Ed's mobile went back into the clothes-pile. It began to ring again; that time both of them ignored it. Ed had, Hal was annoyed to discover, gone half-limp, and required some coaxing and further neck-kissing to get hard again. Frankly Hal would have rather left it, gone down the corridor to the bathroom and washed himself, but he knew that if Ed didn't come he wouldn't feel culpable; he would begin to remember that afternoon as the first time Hal directly involved him in the continuous series of grievous and irremediable fuck-ups that constituted the Lancaster lineage. He would repeat the story later, in increasingly salacious detail, to the grammar school friends who still didn't entirely believe that Ed Poins was or had been in a sustained sexual relationship with _Hal Lancaster, for fuck's sake_. 

No, better that Ed should remember this as the time he got sucked off (by Hal Lancaster, for fuck's sake) in his sister's bed, which was saucy enough that he would blush at admitting it, but not so much that it would drive him to make a desperate anonymous post on a specialist forum asking whether he was actually the only one in the world this had happened to. So Hal put Ed onto his back and knelt between his spread legs, just as Ed had done to him; he finished Ed off precisely eight minutes before the eldest Poins brother unlocked the front door and came tromping up the stairs, calling for Mum or Dad or Ed or Nell. 

 

* * *

 

'What did you say to Dad, anyway?' asked John. He was tipsy on a glass and a half of Bordeaux and a sip of sherry, and was lying on his stomach on one of the sofas in the sitting room of their father's house, idly tracing the damask pattern of the upholstery. Dinner was done with; after-dinner drinks were done with; Lord Northumberland and Lord Westmoreland had tottered out to their cars and driven away. Their father had taken a Class A opoid and retreated to bed. 'I think he was— I didn't see him, he was in his study, but I think he was' —for a terrible moment Hal thought John was going to say what they both knew he meant, which was that their father had been crying— ' _Upset_.' 

'Oh, nothing. Get a life of your own and you'll upset him, too. Anyway,' said Hal, rising from the armchair into which he had sunk, setting down his cup of brandy, 'I'm going out; don't expect me back. If Dad asks tell him I'm having a pint with that fat old queen of mine.'

 

* * *

 


End file.
